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Okay, look, this is going to sound controversial to some of you, and I know I don’t usually
talk about this sort of stuff on this channel, but I have stayed silent about this for far,
far too long: it’s time that Half as Interesting officially condemns the left and everything
that it stands for.
Wait no, no, no, I don’t mean the political “left”—my angry cousin who films vlogs
from the inside of his pickup truck has that market corned.
No, I mean left as in, like, literally the direction left.
C’mon, think about it: what good thing has ever been associated with leftness?
Christians have long associated the left with Satanism and eternal damnation, Jews once
considered the left to be the side of wicked impulses, Muslims have historically discouraged
the use of the left hand for eating, women were accused of witchcraft and burned at the
stake in Salem for being left-handed, early criminologists believed that the criminal
mind was biologically linked with left-handedness, sexy singles in my area always swipe left
when they see my profile on Tinder, and drivers for the United Parcel Service have, since
the 1970s, avoided making any left turns unless absolutely necessary.
Except, well, that last one isn’t about wickedness or witchcraft or the tiny little
hat I’m wearing in all of my Tinder photos—it’s actually just part of a very elaborate mathematical
calculation that UPS needs to make every single day.
You see, UPS trucks aren’t just aimlessly rolling around the country with that Rick
and Morty body pillow you ordered—there’s a lot that needs to happen before it gets
dropped off on your doorstep, hopefully in an unmarked package.
First, your package is labeled, scanned, and taken by truck to one of several hundred regional
sorting facilities.
Then, if you’re one of those casuals who only pays for ground shipping for your body
pillows, it’s loaded on a truck or, if you’re a true alpha, it’s loaded on a plane which,
usually, goes to Louisville for the packages to be processed through UPS’s centrally-located
World Hub.
There, it has a fun little ride on one to two miles of conveyor belts, gets grouped
with other packages destined for similar destinations, and is flown, once again, to a different regional
sorting facility, at which point it can be loaded onto a truck for delivery.
Now, driving a truck full of Rick and Morty body pillows sounds simple enough—just step
on the gas, stay on the road, and hope that the police don’t ask you what’s in the
back of your vehicle—but surprisingly, this final part of the journey is actually the
most complicated and most expensive part of the entire shipping process.
UPS only needs to account for 267 planes, some of which are only flying one or two short
flights per day, but they have an average of 55,000 drivers, all of whom are working
around the clock, making 100-200 deliveries every single day.
This means that one wasted minute per driver per day would cost UPS $14.5 million over
the course of a year, not to mention an additional half million dollars in unused gas, and at
least a thousand more dollars paying some environmentalist guy to go on the morning
news to apologize for wasting that half million dollars on unused gas.
The point is: every minute counts, so finding the shortest possible route for each driver
is absolutely crucial—except, that’s actually not as easy as it sounds.
This is known as the “traveling salesman problem,” and much like the meaning of life
or what age Paul Rudd is, there is still, to this day, no elegant answer.
Given a small amount of points, the traveling salesman problem isn’t too hard—you can
just try every possible route and compare them, but that becomes harder and harder the
more points you add.
Say a driver has 120 stops, that means that there are this many possible routes—and
no, that’s not me being excited about there only being 120 routes—that means 120 factorial,
which is 120 x 119 x 118 x 117, and so on, which, for the record, is otherwise known
as this number and this number is otherwise known as “way too big to deal with.”
Then, on top of that number, there are all sorts of other real-world variables that UPS
has to account for: traffic jams, collisions, bad weather, vicious dog attacks, slightly
less vicious hamster attacks, the driver being seduced by a sultry enchantress who lures
him into her home, poisons him with a glass of 1986 Chateau Lafite, and makes off with
his truck full of Rick and Morty body pillows… in short, there’s no way that UPS could
calculate perfect routes for all of their drivers.
They can, however, implement general optimizations that they know will, on average, shave time
off of routes.
These optimizations include driving with their door open, not stopping to talk to customers,
and, yes, never turning left.
This is for two main reasons: firstly, left hand turns almost always take longer than
right hand turns, because they necessitate cutting across traffic—this also makes them
less fuel efficient, since drivers have to idle while they wait to turn.
Secondly, they’re also more dangerous—left hand turns are more than 3 times as likely
to kill pedestrians than right hand turns, and while one guy’s body isn’t going to
slow down a UPS truck too much, the ensuing lawsuit makes this maneuver a little less
profitable.
By cutting down on every unnecessary left turn when planning routes, UPS is able to
save 10 million gallons of fuel, emit 20,000 tonnes less carbon dioxide, and deliver 350,000
more packages every year.
Of course, all this doesn’t mean UPS trucks don’t turn left, as some less renowned news
sources report, but they do absolutely avoid it, so maybe, the next time you consider cutting
across traffic into a group of pedestrians, you should try taking a tip from our noble
boys in brown.
Now, if you’re trapped in a hospital bed because a reckless driver made a left turn
and ran you over, or you’re trapped in a normal bed because, well, waking up is hard,
you probably have a lot of time on your hands.
If I were you, I would spend that time on Nebula, catching up on exclusive, ad-free
content from your favorite educational creators, including the very first almost-feature-length
Half as Interesting brick special.
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